The i7-2600 was the quad core Hyper-Threaded high tier offering, however it was locked unlike the i7-2600k which you could overclock. Being locked though was not a limiting factor of the 2600. Clocked at 3.4Ghz stock, if you have a Z series motherboard you can lock it at 3.9Ghz provided you have sufficient cooling. The i7-2600 only recently started to lose favor over the newer seventh and eighth generation chips. The main reason they were so popular is due to their low cost compared to their performance. While they may not be ideal for rendering 4k footage, they can handle 1080p content wonderfully.
The i7-2600 scores a modest Geekbench score of 3,700 single core and 12,513 multi core. This is very respectable even today. The newer i7-8700 with 6 cores and Hyper-Threading clocked at 3.2Ghz stock manages to core an impressive score of 5,498 single core and 23,552 multi core. Compared to the newer chip, it doesn’t seem like it could handle much, but don’t let that deceive you. The 2600 is a power house through and through.
Personally, I have been using an i7-2600 since the summer of 2016. Yes… I bought a used five-year-old processor. Why? Because of the incredible price to performance ratio that it offered compared to the current offerings at that time. Do I regret it? Absolutely not! In fact, I only regret not purchasing one sooner. I use it as my daily driver playing video games, editing and rendering videos for my YouTube channel, working on schoolwork, and running Minecraft servers from time to time while running everything else I needed to run.
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